I captured this Loon landing on Lake Phalen one summer afternoon, whiled out walking. It dropped straight down out of the sky, and startled me a bit. It was a rush to get my camera on it, but I managed it, though slightly blurred. I tried to capture that energy in this poem, and made it in first person.

This poem is a Quatern Sonnet.

A Quatern is a poem consisting of four Quatrains, where the first line of the poem ripples through each stanza. It becomes the second line of the second stanza, the third line of the third stanza, and the last of the fourth. It makes for a lovely waterfall effect as the line ripples from beginning to end of the poem. This creates a rhyme scheme of:

Abab bAba abAb babA, or Abab Caca Adad aA,
where the capital letter signifies the repeated line. The first choice uses only two rhymes, while the second uses four.
Written in tetrameter.

Therefore, to make a Quatern Sonnet, you merely turn the last quartain into a rhymed couplet, using the repeated line as the last line of the poem, but retaining the waterfall effect. The trick is to use the repeated line in various ways, changing its aspect, while still being a repeated refrain. The rhyme scheme becomes:

Abab bAba abAb aA.


This photograph was taken by the author himself on June 27, 2016.

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